Ernest Becker Quotes

• Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.

  Ernest Becker

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Relationships

• The best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith.

  Ernest Becker

  Topics in God

• The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity – designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.

  Ernest Becker

  Topics in Death

  Tags in Destiny

• In seeking to avoid evil, [humanity] is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is [our] ingenuity, rather than [our] animal nature, that has given [our] fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate.

  Ernest Becker

  Topics in Fate

  Tags in Evil, Creativity

• The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.

  Ernest Becker

  Topics in Death, Life

• We now know that the human animal is characterized by two great fears that other animals are protected from: the fear of life and the fear of death… Heidegger brought these fears to the center of his existential philosophy. He argued that the basic anxiety of [humanity] is anxiety about being-in-the-world, as well as anxiety of being-in-the-world. That is, both fear of death and fear of life, of experience and individuation.

  Ernest Becker

  Topics in Death, Fear, Life

• When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we already understand the essence of love. Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being.

  Ernest Becker

  Topics in Love, Nature

  Tags in Meaning

• I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. How do we know … that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow?

  Ernest Becker

  Topics in Life, Suffering

  Tags in Meaning

• It is not so much that man is a herd animal, said Freud, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief.

  Ernest Becker

  Topics in Humanity, Leadership, Teamwork

Ernest Becker (9)

Birth:	27th September, 1924
Death:	6th March, 1974
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Anthropologist, Professor, Psychologist, Writer

About

Ernest Becker was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, USA. He was an American cultural anthropologist, psychologist, professor, and writer. He is noted for his 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death. He graduated in cultural anthropology from Syracuse University. He completed his Ph.D. from Syracuse University in 1960. The first of his nine books, Zen: A Rational Critique was based on his doctoral dissertation. He served as a professor at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. Additionally, he worked on the second edition to The Birth and Death of Meaning, and wrote Escape from Evil.

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